Boundaries in written representations

Formal theories of phonographic writing systems have to model, among other things, the regularities in the correspondences between written forms and phonological representations. In the ‘Recoding Model of Graphematics’ (Neef 2005a), correspondence rules for individual letters, supplemented with a set of constraints, serve this task. The aim of this paper is to argue that beyond these basic units, the morphological structure of written words plays a role in theories of phonographic writing systems as well. The relevant aspect of morphological structure is captured in a framework based on the boundary of the potential beginning of a word, which is motivated and evaluated on the basis of a detailed analysis of data from German. Keywords: graphematics; phonographic writing systems; letter; correspondence rule; graphematic domain; graphematic boundary; graphematic word; morphological structure